Opera Mini 4 Copies Safari for iPhone

Developers at Opera appear to be suffering iPhone envy. Today the company rolled out a public beta of its Opera Mini 4 browser, designed for Java enabled phones, which rips off features first unveiled on iPhone's Safari browser. Opera Mini 4 sports Safari's impressive zoom feature that enables users to see a large thumbnail image of a web page, and navigate or zoom to specific sections of the page by tapping in that location.

I've used Opera Mini on my Treo and frankly it stinks. So does the Treo for that matter, but that's another topic. The browser is very poorly optimized and lacks elegance and integration of a native application environment. Opera's mobile browser for Windows Mobile is a much better overall solution, but still lacks refinement. Keep trying, Opera. You'll get it right - eventually.

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Reader comments

Opera Mini 4 Copies Safari for iPhone

Come on, do you really think we (Opera) started working on this new beta after the iPhone details were announced?
Stop spreading propaganda.
We've been working on this new beta for many months already, way before the browser details of the iPhone were made public.

@Daniel
Do you really expect the public to believe that Opera just happened to develop features identical Safari, post iPhone? Don't blame me for pointing out what is painfully obvious. Did your company run out of ideas?

@Tommy
Yes, it stinks, and you obviously have very little experience with mobile web browsers. An example of a good mobile web browser is Nokia's Symbian browser (based on WebKit). That beats anything else on the market right now, including Opera Mobile and Mini.

LOL.
SAFARI'S zoom feature?
You "conveniently" forget that not only has Nokia been doing this for ages with their new Webkit based mobile browser.
You also ignore well known devices with similar zoom and pan capabilities, such as the DS browser, and Nintendo's Internet Channel.
Funny how you claim that Tommy has very little experience with mobile web browsers, seeing as you didn't even know that Nokia and Nintendo (actually, Opera made the Nintendo browsers) have done this for ages already :D

Uh, apparently you have reading comprehension issues because you ignored or overlooked my comment above where I specifically mentioned Nokia's WebKit browser, which by the way I'm quite familiar with - until recently I owned a Nokia E61.
As for Nintendo...I don't play with gaming handhelds, so that's not exactly something I ashamed to be ignorant of. A toy running a toy browser. Sounds like a perfect match.

Ooh, sour grapes for being exposed as lacking any knowledge what so ever about the market :D Funny how you can claim that Opera ripped off Apple when you claim to have been aware that Nokia did it long before Apple did! And yes, Nokia did the development of their minimap feature, not Apple.
But anyway, a toy browser. Sure. A toy browser which had been doing full web browsing for many years by the time Steve-o got around to bragging about it :D
Anyway, the bottom line is that you screwed yourself. You thought Opera ripped off Apple when it turns out that it is Apple who is ripping off Opera and others, and bragging about it. Sorry to see your world crumble around you, but "c'est la vie"!
You might want to give the Wii console a go some time. It's amazingly popular and outselling everything else except Nintendo's own DS portable. People of all ages get these consoles. Toys or not, who cares? Only immature teenagers keep referring to them as that.